Owning a car. I want to walk in a city made for people. I can’t afford to move.
I live in a major city but like I’m in a bad neighborhood so there’s only one grocery store within 5 miles. It makes no sense. A food desert in a major city so that I’m forced to drive just to like get screws from a hardware store or toilet paper or something
Our US city (pop 180k, metro 600k) is just about to lose the last downtown grocery store.
Generations of city councils have allowed (or encouraged!) the demolition of all housing in the city core to replace it with parking lots.
There’s almost no one left downtown so the city itself is dying. It’s just kind of rotting away. There’s currently at least some effort to reverse the trend, but the vice grip that car oriented everything has on people is terrifying to politicians.
Same. My work is only a mile away but there are hardly any sidewalks and I often have to walk next to roads going like 40 mph. Plus all of the intersections and crosswalks are catered for car travel, meaning there has to be absolutely zero cars to give you the signal to walk. Crossing a single crosswalk “legally” takes like 5 or 10 mins of waiting.
In Amsterdam the crosswalks are catered for pedestrians and you typically only need to wait 15-30 seconds as they don’t mind stopping a few cars.
Being depressed.
Same. I got kicked out of a therapy group for the self-destructive today, fifth time something like this happened based on rumors that made people in charge think “we make a living encouraging people to be satisfied with life, but this woman doesn’t deserve it.”
It sounds like that those therapy groups suck, honestly.
I’ve never tried groups, but I found a really amazing therapist so they exist, hope you find one who helps you.
Before that stroke of luck, I found a few books that helped me a lot with self sabotaging and other issues. If you’re interested, I could share.
Best of luck out there.
Thanks. People can’t open up these days (or even talk about it) it seems.
Eating out of stress or boredom instead of when I’m actually hungry. I am getting better, but still, sometimes work pisses me off so much it’s back to angrily stuffing whatever food I have on hand into my gaping maw…
I want to stop ruminating about things I wish I would have said or some stupid thing I did say or why did I do that
Forgiving yourself is difficult. You have grown enough to realize what you did was dumb. Whenever your brain decides to throw a random cringe memory in your face, consciously tell yourself you’re better now and you forgive yourself for your mistakes. It helped me.
To get out of those spirals, I just remind myself that I’ve probably forgotten hundreds of things other people probably regret saying/doing, and odds are most people probably forgot mine. Even if I’m sure someone didn’t forget it, I doubt they ever think about it anymore.
Working “full time”. I love what I actually do at work (generally) but like… doing it 9-6 five days a week is so fucking draining. It feels like working defined hours for the sake of working in those hours. Obviously for most jobs the hours spent working do matter, but for software development it may actually be counterproductive as being tired fucks up your productivity hard
It’s kind of funny. When I’m working on my own stuff, I could easily dump like 60+ hours a week into it. But once there’s an obligation to work on something, especially if it’s scheduled, 40 is unbearable.
Same. Idike to tone it down to 32h/week or even better 24h/week. So 8, respectively 6 hours a day for four days. Working for a non-profit organisation and even though we a trade agreement, because we’re unionised, living in a city on my own I couldn’t pay the bills if I’d cut hours.
Where you’re at now sounds particularly bad, but having worked fully remotely for a few years myself, it definitely isn’t guaranteed to be better for your work-life balance. It’s difficult to separate the two spheres for one thing, and you can still end up in a situation where you may get requests, messages and pings come through at any time, constantly.
I’ve worked for roughly half a dozen employers so far. In my experience an employer may SAY they value employee work-life balance, that’s no guarantee they actually will. They may also genuinely believe they prioritise it, but still fall hugely short of what other employers can offer.
Fuck burnout culture though. Also fuck teams that celebrate “heroes”